Learning---- a joy, not a job

    In my opinion, gamification is using games to motivate learners to be involved in solving problems, and during the process of playing game, learners can develop their competence and skills, thus achieving their study goal. Just as 7 things youshould know about games and learning mentions, it has been long understood that games have the potential to be applied to teaching and will contribute to the improvement of students’ study. Meanwhile, games are increasing being employed at colleges and universities such as the Social Media Innovation Quest which can help students retain information and GradeCraft which can be used not only in supplying analytics data but also in political theory and information studies.

     Compared with adult learners, teenagers tend to be more difficult to focus on one thing for long and easy to shift their attention to other thing. Games can appeal to teenagers’ attention for longer time since they are more interesting than just finish the academic task. Should we employ games in teenagers’ class? In Technology—“Just”Playing Games? A Look at the Use of Digital Games for Language Learning, Julie considered that digital game principles offer a way to overcome challenges of the language classroom which are boring and less dynamic sometimes. As a matter of fact, I found my students were easy to be distracted and sleepy when I kept talking for about 20 minutes. Sometimes, I had to play games or use other activities to attract their attention. In addition, digital game design offers a new perspective to our overall understanding of language learning and teaching. I can still remember I taught a word “temple” to my students. One of the students shouted with joy” I know this word because I come across it when I play computer games”. All of us burst into laughter. However, I began to think why not combine games with language study? Maybe it can encourage more students engaged in learning English.

     It is no doubt that the educational game can motivate students develop their competence and skills. However, if not designed well, educational games may be viewed as silly by learners and will be waste a lot of time, which is dangerous. What should we do? In sculpting flow and fiero, Zac Hill considered that games are popular precisely because they address real human needs and evoke real human emotions. Flow and fiero are two of the most straightforward of those. So the educational games should also contain these two features. We can design “play” along something called an engagement curve, that is to say, to present challenges to people according to the teaching goal we want them to achiever. In fact, many language-learning APP can be found now on the internet, however, it is still a long way to design good educational games and apply them to the class successfully.